Marx developed a theory which
is both scientific and critical. However, in most interpretations and further
developments of his thought either one or the other of these two essential characteristics
has invariably been overlooked. Among those who speak in the name of Marx or
consider themselves his intellectual followers some accept only his radical
criticism of the society of his time, some lay emphasis only on his contribution
to positive scientific knowledge about contemporary social structures and processes.

To the former group belong,
on the one hand, various apologists of post‑capitalist society who develop
Marxism as an ideology, and, on the other hand, those romantic humanists who
consider positive knowledge a form of intellectual subordination to the given
social framework, and who are ready to accept only the anthropological ideas
of the young Marx.

To the latter group belong all
those scientists who appreciate Marx's enormous contribution to modern social
science, but who fail to realize that what fundamentally distinguishes Marx's
views from those of Comte, Mill, Ricardo and other classical social scientists,
as well as from those of modern positivists, is his constant radical criticism
of both existing theory and existing forms of social reality.

The failure of most contemporary
interpreters of Marx to grasp one of the basic novelties of his doctrine has
very deep roots in the intellectual climate of our time and can be explained
only by taking into account some of the fundamental divisions and polarizations
in contemporary theoretical thinking.

I.  The development of
science and philosophy in the twentieth century has been decisively influenced
by the following three factors: (1) the accelerated growth of scientific knowledge,
which gave rise to a new technological revolution characterized by automation,
use of huge new sources of energy and new exact methods of management; (2) the
discovery of the dark irrational side of human nature through psychoanalysis,
anthropological investigations of primitive cultures, surrealism and other trends
of modern arts, and, above all, through unheard of mass eruptions of brutality
from the beginning of World War I up to the present day; (3) the beginning of
a process whereby existing forms of class society are destructuralized, and
the rapidly increasing role of ideology and politics.

(1) As the result of a rapid
technological development and of an increasing division of work in modern industrial
society, the rationality of science has gradually been reduced to the narrow
technological rationality of experts, interested only in promoting and conveying
highly specialized positive knowledge. In an effort to free itself from the
domination of theology and mythology, modern science has always tended to dismiss
unverifiable theoretical generalizations and value‑judgments. As a consequence,
a spiritual vacuum was created, which, under the given historical conditions,
could be filled only by faith in power, faith in success of all kinds. This
philosophy of success, this obsession with the efficiency of means, followed
by an almost total lack of interest in the problem of rationality and humanity
of goals, are the essential characteristics of the spiritual climate of contemporary
industrial society.

By now it has become quite clear
that, while increasing power over nature, material wealth, and control over
some blind forces of history, while creating new historical opportunities for
human emancipation, the material form of positive science, industry has neglected
many essential human needs, and has multiplied the possibilities of human manipulation.
The universal penetration of technology into all forms of social life has been
followed by the penetration of a routine and uniform life‑style. Growth
of material wealth did not make men happier; data on suicide, alcoholism, mental
illness, juvenile delinquency, etc., even indicate a positive correlation between
the degree of technological development and social pathological phenomena.

Obviously, positive science
and technology set off unpredicted and uncontrollable social processes. The
scientist who does not care about the broader social context of his inquiry
loses all control over the product of his work. The history of the creation
and use of nuclear weapons is a drastic example. Another one is the abuse of
science for ideological purposes. The most effective and, therefore, most dangerous
propaganda is not that which is based on obvious untruths, but that which, in
order to rationalize the interests of privileged social groups, uses partial
truths established by science.

Science would be helpless against such abuses if it were
atomized, unintegrated, uninterested in the problems of wholes, and neutral
with regard to such general human values as emancipation, solidarity, development,
production according to the "laws of beauty", disalienation, etc.

However, the most influential
philosophy in contemporary science is positivism, according to which the sole
function of science is to describe and explain what there is and, if
at least some laws are known, to extrapolate what there will probably be. All
evaluation in terms of needs, feelings, ideals, in terms of ethical, aesthetic
and other standards, are considered basically irrational and, from the scientific
point of view, pointless. The only function of science, then, is to investigate
the most adequate means for the ends which have been determined by others. In
this way, science loses its power to supersede the existing forms of historical
reality and to project new, essentially different and more humane historical
possibilities. By its indifference towards goals it only leads to an abstract
growth of power, and to a better adjustment within a given framework of social
life. The framework itself remains unchallenged. Thus, behind this apparent
neutrality and absence of any value orientation one discovers an implicit conservative
orientation. Even a passive resistance to the reduction of science to a mere
servant of ideology and politics is acceptable to the ruling elite, because
pure, positive, unintegrated knowledge can always be interpreted and used in
some profitable way: ultimately society would become devoid of its critical
self‑consciousness.

(2) Nowadays, positivism and
other variants of philosophical intellectualism, conformism and utilitarianism
are facing strong opposition from all those philosophers, writers and artists
who prefer "the logic of heart" to "the logic of reason",
and who rebel against the prospect of an impersonal inauthentic life in an affluent
mass society of the future. They see that power and material wealth in themselves
do not help man to overcome his anxiety, his loneliness, his perplexity, boredom,
uprootedness, his spiritual and emotional poverty. They see that new experiences
in political life, modern art, and science are signs of a general lack of order
and stability in the world, and of a basic human irrationality. Thus they reinforce
the feeling that from all the successes of positive sciences and technology
has emerged a fragile, unreasonable and suicidal society.

As a reaction against the spirit
of the Enlightenment (which has to some extent survived in the form of positivism),
a powerful anti‑Enlightenment attitude is gaining ground among intellectuals.
The world does not make sense, there is no rational pattern by which the individual
can hope to master it, no causal explanation which would allow him to predict
the future. There is no determination and progress in history; the history of
civilization is only the history of growing human estrangement and self-deception.
Human existence is absurd. Man, who is confronted with a universe in which there
is pure contingency, and who lacks any stable internal structure, lives a meaningless
life filled with dread, guilt, and despair. There are no reasons to believe
that man is basically good; evil is a permanent possibility in his existence.

Such an anti‑positivist
and anti‑Enlightenment philosophy (which has been most consistently expressed
in Lebensphilosophie and various forms of existentialism) is clearly
critical, and concerned with the problems of individual existence. However,
this kind of rebellion against "given" and "existing" tends
to be as immediate as possible and to avoid any mediation by positive
knowledge and logic. The basic idea of this obviously anti-rationalist form
of criticism is the following: to rely on empirical science already means to
be caught up within the framework of the given present reality. On the other
hand , as neither the historical process nor the human being has any definite
structure preceding existence, all general knowledge is pointless. Nothing about
the present can be inferred from the past, nor can the future be determined
on the basis of knowledge of the present. All possibilities are open. Freedom
of projection is unlimited.

This kind of romantic rebellious
criticism is entirely powerless. Postulated absolute freedom is only freedom
of thought; as Hegel already showed in Phenomenologie des Geistes, it
is the imagined freedom of a slave. Real criticism must start with the discovery
of concrete practical forms of slavery, with the examination of human bonds
and real, practical possibilities of liberation. Without such concrete and practical
examination (which requires the use of all relevant social knowledge and the
application of scientific methods), criticism is only an alienated form of disalienation.

(3) In an historical epoch of
fundamental social transformation a theory which expresses the needs and acceptable
programs of action of powerful social forces becomes a decisive historical determinant.

The theory of Marx has been
playing such a revolutionary role throughout the historical epoch of human emancipation
from alienated labor. It has been and still is the theoretical basis for every
contemporary form of active and militant humanism.

The critical thought of Marx
is the fullest and, historically, the most developed expression of human rationality.
It contains, in a dialectically superseded form, the essence of ancient Greek
theoria: a rational knowledge of the world's structure, with which man
can change the world and determine his own life. Hegel's dialectical reasoning
is already a creative negation of the Greek notion of ratio and theory, in which
the contradictions between static, rational thinking and irrational dynamics,
between positive assertion and abstract negation are superseded (aufgehoben).The theory and method of Marx is a decisive step further in the process
of totalization and concretization of dialectical reasoning: it embraces not
only change in general but also, in particular, the human, historical form of
change: praxis. The dialectic of Marx raises the question of rationality,
and not only the rationality of the individual, but also that of society as
a whole, not only rationality within a given closed system, but also that of
the system's very limits, not only rationality of praxis as thinking but also
of praxis as material activity, as a mode of real life, in space and time. There
is dialectical reasoning in history only in the extent to which it creates a
reasonable reality.

This theoretico‑practical
conception of man and human history has not been further developed by Marx's
followers in its totality; rather it has been divided up into its component
parts: various branches of social science, philosophical anthropology, dialectics,
philosophy of history, conception of proletarian revolution and socialism as
a concrete program of practical action, etc.

In socialist society, as in
capitalist society, science that had no dialectic and humanist philosophy incorporated
in its telos, in all its assumptions, criteria and methods of inquiry,
developed as partial, positive, expert knowledge, which informs about the given
but does not seek to discover its essential inner limitations and overcome them.
The connection with philosophy remained doubly external: first, because this
science assimilated the principles of Marxism in a fixed, completed form as
something given, obligatory, imposed by authority, abstract, torn out of context,
simplified, vulgarized; second, because these principles externally applied
do not live the life of science, are not subject to the process of normal critical
testing, reexamining, revising, but become dogmas of a fixed doctrine.

That is why Marxist philosophy
became increasingly abstract, powerless, conservative. That part of it which
pretended to be a Weltanschauung looked more and more like a boring,
old‑fashioned, primitive Naturphilosophie, and the other part,
which was supposed to state the general principles for interpreting social phenomena
and revolutionary action, assumed increasingly the character of pragmatic apologetics,
expected to serve as a foundation for ideology, and for the justification of
past and present policies.

This temporary degeneration
was the consequence of several important circumstances:

 Marxist theory became
the official ideological doctrine of victorious labor movements;

 revolutions had unexpected
success just in those underdeveloped countries of East Europe and Asia where,
in addition to socialist objectives, the tasks of a previous primitive accumulation,
industrialization, and urbanization had to be accomplished;

 it was necessary, under
such conditions, to give priority to accelerated technological development,
to establish a centralized system and to impose an authoritarian structure on
all thinking and social behavior.

Thus a return to and reinterpretation
of Marx's thought is needed, in order to restore and to further develop his
critical method.

II.  The essential theoretical
and methodological novelty of Marx's conception of science is constituted by
the following features:

1) By moving in the research
process from unanalyzed concrete phenomena (population, wealth, etc.) to abstract
universals (commodity, labor, money, capital, surplus‑value, etc.) and
from these back to analyzed empirico-theoretical concrete phenomena, Marx succeeds
in overcoming the traditional dualism between the empirical and the rational
(speculative) approach. There is no doubt that he tries to support each of his
contentions by as ample evidence as possible; all his major works have been
preceded by years of studying data and establishing facts. But, in sharp contrast
to empiricism, Marx's science neither begins with brute facts nor remains satisfied
with simple inductive generalizations from them. His real starting position
is a philosophical vision and a thorough critical study of all preceding relevant
knowledge. Initial evidence is only a necessary part of the background against
which he builds up a whole network of abstract scientific concepts, endowed
with an impressive explanatory power. This elaboration of a new conceptual apparatus
(new not so much in the sense of introducing new terminology as in the sense
of giving new meanings to already existing terms) is the most important and
most creative part of Marx's scientific work.

(2) According to Marx, science
should be primarily concerned not with the description of details and explanation
of isolated phenomena, but with the study of whole structures, of social situations
taken in their totality. That is why Marx's new science does not know any sharp
division into branches and disciplines. Das Kapitalbelongs not
only to economics but also to sociology, law, political science, history, and
philosophy. However, although the notion of totality plays an overwhelming role
in the methodology of Marx, his approach is not purely synthetical. Marx knew
that any attempt to grasp totalities directly, without analytical mediation,
leads to myth and ideology. Therefore, a necessary phase of his method is the
analytic breakdown of initial, directly grasped wholes into their components,
which in the final stages of inquiry have to be brought back into various relations
with other components, and conceived only as moments within a complex structure.

(3) Those variants of contemporary
Marxist humanism which are mainly interested in the diachronic aspects of social
formations, and structuralism, which pays attention only to their synchronic
aspects, are degenerated and one‑sided developments of certain essential
moments of Marx's method. In Marx's new science these moments are inseparable.
A totality cannot be fully understood without taking into account the place
it occupies in history. A system is meaningful only as a crystallization of
the past forms of human practice and with respect to historically possible futures.
On the other hand, what is historically possible cannot be grasped without taking
into account determining structural characteristics of the whole given situation.
Marx discovered self‑destructive forces within the very structure of the
capitalist system; without establishing the law of decreasing average rate of
profit and other laws of capitalist economy, he would not have been able to
point out the historical possibility that capitalist society will disappear.
But on the other hand, had he not had a profound sense of history, had he approached
capitalist society in the same ahistorical way as Smith, Ricardo and other bourgeois
economistsas the permanent, natural structure of human society, he would
hardly have been able to look for and find all those structural features which
determine both the relative stability and ultimate transformation of the whole
system.

(4) A true sense of history
implies a critical attitude, not only towards all rival theories but
also towards the examined society. Marx's dialectics is essentially a method
of critique and of revolutionary practice. He himself had expressed this fundamental
characteristic of his method by saying that dialectics arouses the anger and
horror of the bourgeoisie, because it introduces into a positive understanding
of existing states, the understanding of the negation of the bourgeoisie,
of its necessary destruction; because it con­ceives every existing form
in its change, therefore as something in transition; because it does
not let anything be imposed upon it, and because it is fundamentally critical
and revolutionary [1]. This thought was expressed
much earlier in Theses on Feuerbach: thebasic weakness of traditional
materialism was to construe reality only as object, not as praxis. This
praxis is critical and revolutionary; man is not just the product of social
conditions, but the being who can change these conditions. He lives in a world
full of contradictions, but he can resolve and practically remove them. The
main objective of philosophical criticism should be the "real essence"
of man; however, this essence is not something ahistorical and unchangea­ble,
but the totality of social relationships. In short, what really matters is not
just the explanation of, but also the change of the world.

What must follow from such activistic
assumptions is a new conception of the function of science. According to this
conception, science does not only provide positive knowledge but also develops
critical self‑consciousness. It does not only describe and explain the
historical situation but also evaluates it and shows the way out. It does not
only discover laws and establish what are the possibilities and probabilities
of the future, it also indicates which possibilities best correspond to certain
basic human needs. Thus critical scientific thought is not satisfied by showing
how man can best adjust to the prevailing trends of a situation and to the whole
social framework; it expresses a higher level idea of rationality by showing
how man can change the whole framework and adapt it to himself.

Two examples would suffice to
illustrate this conception of critical science.

In his economic writings Marx
thoroughly examines structural and functional characteristics of capitalistic
society. He does that in an objective way, in accordance with all requirements
of the scientific method of his time. But a critical anthropological standpoint
is always present: man is a "generic being", a potentially free, creative,
rational, social being. In relation to what man could already be,
how he could already live in a highly productive and integrated industrialized
society, Marx shows how utterly limited and crippled man in fact is in a system
in which he is reducedto his working power, in which his working power
is being bought as a thing, and regarded not as creative power, but as a mere
quantity of energy which can be efficiently objectified and marketed with a
good profit. The message of Marx's theory is not that the worker could better
adjust to the situation by demanding a higher price for his labor powerinsofar
as his labor power is a mere commodity, he already receives the equivalent for
it. The implication of Marx's theory is that the worker should reject the status
of a thing, of a commodity, and change the whole social framework in which his
labor is so alienated.

Another example. In his criticism
of Hegelian philosophy of law, Marx points out that the general interest of
a human community could not be constituted by the abstract concept of an ideal,
rational state. Insofar as in "civil society" there is bellum omnium
contra omnes and each individual and social group pursues only one or another
particular interest, the general interest of a truly human community has not
yet been awakened. The Hegelian state, construed as a moment of objective spirit,
exists only in abstract thought. What exists in reality is alienated political
power beside and above all individual and particular interests.
The form of this alienated political power, which treats society as the simple
object of its activity, is the state and its bureaucracy. Now, Marx's explanation
of the nature of professional politics, the state and bureaucracy does not lead
to the conclusion that man could be freer if he would simply make the state
more democratic or increase control over bureaucracy. Without disregarding the
temporary importance of such modifications, Marx opens up the prospects of a
radical human emancipation by altogether abolishing the state and political
bureaucracy as forms of social organization. This, according to Marx, is possible
if organized labor, the only class whose ultimate interests coincide with those
of mankind as a whole, practically removes the economic and political monopoly
of any particular social group. The atomized, disintegrated world of the owners
of commodities would, in such a way, be superseded by an integrated community
of producers. The state would be replaced by organs of self‑management,
i.e. by institutions composed of the true representatives of the people,
who have been elected by a general free vote, who are immediately responsible
to and replaceable by their voters, and who do not enjoy any privileges for
the duties they perform.

III.  The nature of the
key concepts in Marx's anthropology and philosophy of history best shows the
character of his theoretical thought. These concepts are not only descriptive
and explanatory but also value‑laden and critical.

Thus Marx's criticism of the
fetishism of commodities in Capital can be understood only if we bear
in mind his assumption of a truly human production, in which man affirms
both himself and the other:

1) by objectifying his individuality
and by experiencing his personality as an objective, sensate power by an immediate
awareness that through his activity and through the use of his product, the
needs of all other human being can be satisfied;

2) by mediating between the
other and generic human being (his activity become part of the other's, whom
it has enriched and complemented) so as to allow man to immediately affirm and
fulfill his own generic being [2].

Alienated labor is labor which
lacks these qualities.

In a similar way the concepts
of social man, human needs, history, freedom, the state, capital, communism,
etc. always imply a distinction between actual and possible, between factual
and ideal.

Social man is not just
the individual who lives together with other individuals, or who conforms to
the given norms of a society. Such a person can be very far from reaching the
level of a social being. On the other hand, a person may be compelled to live
in isolation and still profoundly need others, and carry in his language, thinking,
and feeling all the essential characteristics of generic human being.

In this sense, Marx distinguishes,
for example, between mail who regards woman as "prey and the handmaid of
communal lust", "who is infinitely degraded in such an existence for
himself", and man whose "natural behavior towards woman has become
human" and "whose needs have become human needs". This "most
natural, immediate and necessary relationship" shows to what extent man
"is, in his individual existence, at the same time a social being".
[3]

Furthermore, history is
not just a series of events in timeit presupposes supersession of "the
realm of necessity" and full emancipation of man. That is why Marx sometimes
labelled history of our time as "prehistory".

Freedom never meant for
Marx only choice among several possibilities or "the right to do and perform
anything that does not harm others". Freedom in Marx's sense is the ability
to self‑determine and to rationally control the blind forces of nature
and history. "All emancipation is restoration of the human world and the
relationships among men themselves". [4]

The state is not just
any social organization which directs social processes and takes care of the
order and stability of the society. The typical feature of the state, according
to Marx, is its coercive character as an instrument of the ruling class. The
state is institutionalized alienated power. Thus Marx very definitely maintained
that the labor movement must abolish the state very soon after successful revolution,
and replace it by the associations of workers.

Capital is not only objectified
labor, stored up in the form of money or any particular commodity. It is the
objectified labor which at a given level of material production appropriates
surplus value. The objective form of capital conceals and mystifies a social
relationship beyond it; the object mediates between those who produce and those
who rule.

There is no doubt that in both
the early and the mature writings the concept of communism does not only
express a possible future social state, but also contains an evaluation of that
state. In Economic and philosophical manuscripts there are even three
different descriptions and evaluations: 1: "crude communism" in which
"the domination of material property looms so large that it aims to destroy
everything that is incapable of being possessed by everyone as private property";
2: communism "(a) still political in nature, (b) with the abolition of
the state, yet still incomplete and influenced by private property, that is,
by the alienation of man"; 3: communism "as the positive abolition
of private property, and of human self‑alienation". [5]
But even when, in The German ideology, Marx denies that communism is
"an ideal to which reality will have to adjust, he says, we call
communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs".
[6] Here the adjective "real" clearly
is a value term.

Therefore any attempt to determine
the nature of Marx's scientific thought should lead to the conclusion that it
is both knowledge and a vision of the future. As knowledge it is vastly different
from the idea of knowledge propounded in any variant of empiricist philosophy,
because for Marx, our future project determines the sense of everything in the
present and the past, and this preliminary vision of the future is more an expression
of revolt than it is a simple extrapolation of the present trends determined
in an empirical way. And still, no matter how bold and pervaded by passion is
this vision of the future, it is not merely an arbitrary dream or a utopian
hope. The future is not a logical inference from the present, it is not the
result of a prediction made according to the methodological standards of empirical
science, nor is it divorced from the present and the past. At the beginning
of inquiry, it is a relatively a priori projection (based more on preceding
theory than on empirical data). But when, at the end of inquiry, it has been
shown that the preliminary vision has been confirmed by all available evidence
about actual trends in the present reality, then a posteriori, this vision
of the future becomes meaningful knowledge.

This dialectic between the future
and the present, the possible and the actual, philosophy and science, value
and fact, a priori and a posteriori, criticism and description,
is perhaps the essential methodological contribution of Marx to contemporary
scienceone which so far has not been sufficiently taken into account,
even by the followers of Marx themselves.

IV.  In order to clarify
and further elaborate our contention about the critical character of Marx's
scientific thought, we should add the following qualifications:

1. Criticism is present in all
Marx's works and at all stages of his intellectual development, To make a sharp
distinction between the value‑laden humanist utopia of the young Marx
and the value‑free scientific structuralism of the mature Marx would be
a grave error, indicating a superficial study of his work. To be sure, there
are some important differences in methodology, in richness, and concreteness
of the conceptual apparatus used, in the extent to which theory is supported
by empirical evidence. However, the fundamental critical position remains the
same. There is often only a change of vocabulary, or a substitution of specific
terms applicable to capitalistic society for general terms applicable to society
in general. For example, what Marx calls "alienated labor" in his
early writings (e.g. in Economic and philosophical manuscripts)
will, in Capital, be called "the world of commodities". Or,
in his criticism of Hegel's philosophy of the state Marx says that "the
abolition of bureaucracy will be possible when general interest becomes a reality"
and "particular interest really becomes general interest"; in Capital
and in his analysis of the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx is much
more concrete and explicit: associated producers will do away with the state
and take the control over exchange with nature into their own hands.

2. Marxist criticism is radical
although not destructive in a nihilistic sense. Without understanding the Hegelian
concept of aufheben, the nature of this criticism can hardly be grasped.

In spite of the differences
between Hegel's and Marx's methods, they both maintain that the idea of dialectical
negation contains both a moment of discontinuity and a moment of continuity:
a moment of discontinuity insofar as the given cannot be accepted as it is (as
truth in Hegel's logic, as satisfactory human reality in Marx's interpretation
of history), a moment of continuity insofar as a component of the given must
be conserved as the basis for further developmentit is only the inner
limitation which must be overcome.

Most Marxists are not quite
clear about the nature of Marxist criticism, but this is not surprising, considering
how few have tried to interpret him in the context of the whole intellectual
tradition to which he belongs. However, a good deal of misunderstanding is of
an ideological character. Thus, in order to develop a militant optimism or to
express a natural revolt against market economy tendencies in underdeveloped
socialist countries, some Marxists tend to underestimate the importance of those
forms of civilization, of political democracy, of educational and welfare institutions
which have been developed in Western industrial society. Marx took into account
the possibility of such a primitive negation of private property and called
it "crude" and "unreflective" communism, which "negates
the personality of man in every sphere", "sets up universal envy and
levelling down", "negates in an abstract way the whole world of culture
and civilization", and constitutes a regression to the "unnatural
simplicity of the poor wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private
property but has not yet even attained it". [7]
Thus, there can hardly be any doubt that, for Marx, a true negation of class
society and alienated labor is possible only at a high level of historical development.

Such a negation presupposes
an abundance of material goods, various civilized patterns of human behavior
(which arise as scarcity is overcome), and, most important of all, an individual
who, among other things, has overcome at least the elementary, rudest forms
of greed for material objects.

In this respect, some Marxists
are overly‑radical critics, who fail to realize that certain features
of advanced capitalism are necessary conditions for any higher forms of society.
But these same Marxists, in some other essential respects, give the impression
of being reformers; they remain quite satisfied with certain initial changes,
and all too soon become interested in preserving the status quo, rather than
in persisting in their revolutionary role, and striving for further and deeper
structural changes.

What present day socialism offers
as a practical solution to the fundamental problems of alienated labor and political
alienation is far from constituting truly radical criticism, or from really
superseding the alienation of capitalist society.

As we have said, the main source
of exploitation and of all other aspects of economic alienation lies in the
rule of objectified, stored‑up labor over living labor. [8]
The social group disposing of stored‑up labor is able to appropriate surplus
value. The specific historical form of this structure in Marx's time was the
disposal of capital on the grounds of private ownership of the means of production:
however, private property is not the cause but the effect of alienated labor.
Abolition of the private ownership of the means of production is only abolition
of one possible specific form of the rule of dead labor over living labor. The
general structure remains if there is any other social group such as, for example,
bureaucracy, which retains monopoly on decision making concerning the disposal
of accumulated and objectified labor. Therefore, only such criticism might be
considered radical and truly revolutionary which puts a definitive end to exploitation
and which aims at creating conditions in which associate producers themselves
will dispose of the products of their labor.

Another example. If the state,
as such, is historically a form of alienated political power, the abolition
of the bourgeois state is only an important step in the process of disalienation
of politics. This step, according to Marx, (and Lenin in State and revolution)must be followed by a transition period of gradually withering away of any
coercive state apparatus. Unless such an apparatus is replaced by an entirely
different social organization, all the symptoms of political alienation, such
as apathy, distrust, lust for power, need for charismatic leadership and for
ideological rationalization, use of all available techniques for manipulating
masses, etc. will be reproduced.

Insofar as in man there is a profound Faustian need to rebel
against any permanent, historically‑determined limitations in nature,
in society and in himself, he will strive to supersede such limitations, to
develop further his human world and his own nature. Such an activistic attitude
towards the world will always need a philosophical and scientific thought which
would constitute a bold radical criticism of existing reality.

NOTES

1. K. Marx, Capital, Afterword
to the second German edition. [>main text]